Patrick Mannion
TechOnline

Even as they latest crop of platforms began rolling out late last year, improvements and upgrades were already in the works. The Xbox 360 Elite's big improvements over the 360 were a bigger hard drive and a HDMI connection. According to Quirk, Sony is about to release a PS3 with an 80-Gbyte hard drive, up from 60 Gbytes—and will kill the 20-Gbyte option. The move to online gaming and the ability to download content has been a huge driver of local storage. Nintendo's Wii came with Wi-Fi capability out-of-the-box and while the others support Wi-Fi as a peripheral, SI expects them to have it out of the box soon. Other features now commonplace include force feedback and rumble capability, motion sensing, vision feedback and high-definition using either Blu-ray or HD-DVD.

"It'll be interesting to see what happens in the Blu-ray versus HD-DVD fight," said Yogasingam, who expects to see a Blu-ray add-on option from Microsoft. "Microsoft isn't heavily invested in HD-DVD."

All these changes, while critical, don't compare to the innovation Nintendo had with its motion-sensing interface. "Nintendo Wii created something that was completely different for the first time in 15 years," said Quirk. "They didn't have the same graphics-materials-processor focus [as Sony or Microsoft], they focused more on the gaming 'experience'." He also said Nintendo opened up the market across age dividers. "It spans 6 to 60 while Microsoft and Sony focus on the 18- to 34-year-olds: hardcore gamers who can afford them." The Nintendo Wii costs $249 while the PS3 and Xbox are between $500 and $700.

Future designs—and opportunities aplenty
One of the business fundamentals of gaming-platform design is that the company must pace their redesigns to maximize the return on each platform upgrade. "It'll be another four or five years before we see something new, especially given that they're losing money on each system," said Quirk. "They need to extend lifecycles to make money." That said, all will continue to add features and connectivity support, "but they'll need to lower cost through process shrinks."

SI expected the current crop of designs to incorporate 65-nm process technologies, down from 90 nm, but that didn't happen, so Quirk believes that'll be coming soon from Sony and Microsoft as part of their cost-reduction strategy. That need for cost-reduction was the main impetus behind the Sony/Toshiba/IBM and Nintendo/IBM/ATI/Chartered partnerships, and while SI expects those partnerships to remain intact going forward, part of the strategy for future cost reductions will be the evaluation of second- and third-tier chip and software vendors as they jockey for a socket in the next round of platform designs.

"There's a lot more competition," said Quirk. "Everyone wants to get designed into them. With volumes in the hundreds of millions, a design win for of these gaming platforms is huge, both from a press and revenue point of view."

With the runaway success of Wii's 6-axis controller technology, Quirk and Yogasingam expect MEMS to be an increasing part of controller design, as well as for PDAs and other handsets. For wireless, 802.11n is hot. "If .11n finally becomes a standard, they'll all include it," said Quirk.

With constant evaluation, keeping a design win is almost as hard as winning it. "Nintendo could easily shove Broadcom out in favor of Marvell," said Yogasingam. Also, second sources are crucial. "Whomever has the part when it's needed," may well determine the winner, he added. For example, on the Xbox, Elpida and Samsung are flipped in and out at Microsoft's whim. The same for Elpida and Qimonda on the PS3.

For displays, Quirk predicts the cost of newer, super-high-definition systems that are now emerging will come down in time for next-generation boxes, while Yogasingam predicts gaming and entertainment will converge on one box with DVD, Internet/broadband, storage, set-top box capability and video/audio.

"Video gaming is helping drive technology and will continue to do so," said Quirk. "And consumers are helping to drive that."

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